Sunday, March 14, 2010

In a magical land of peanut butter and chocolate...

Walk with me through the chocolate cupcake mountain range, topped with peanut butter snow. It smells good and it's beautiful.

So, last night/this morning I had one of the more memorable migraines I've had in a while - which means I got a late start on my plans. I did manage to make my goal - and it was so much fun! After whipping up a batch of cupcakes from a box, I made my first ever batch of Swiss Meringue Buttercream. If you're curious, I used a recipe found here, with help from here on flavoring. Since I'm pretty careful about raw eggs (plus I hate throwing yolks away), I used meringue powder - which worked great. I mixed in creamy natural peanut butter for flavor and added a little bit of salt because all I had was unsalted butter and unsalted peanut butter.

The texture is wonderful to work with - it's smooth and it pipes really easily - WAY faster than spreading frosting on with a knife. It has a glossy finish - very pretty.

The only drawback for me is that I'm not sure if it's going to be my favorite kind of frosting. It seemed a little bit too much like flavored butter on top of my cupcake. I think I need to keep looking for a frosting recipe that is still easy to work with, but more sugar & other flavor rather than butter.

About Me

I'm a civil engineer, a shopper, a marathoner, a chef, and a reader. Also, I love to sew and scrapbook, sing and dance, bake and sleep. There's also a tiny part of me that hopes to someday wear really fashionable clothes. The big part of me likes shoes. :)